Terror From Iraq: 17 years later

America is tired of Iraq. Why? Who cares? They are exhausted. They don’t want to hear anymore about it. This is very much due to the general disappointment that we are still engaged in a war that some Americans feel we shouldn’t be involved in. This is often followed by heartfelt emotions:

• Why are we half a world away fighting unprovoked people we don’t even know?
• We shouldn’t even be there.

This is usually followed by a set of (somewhat) true but misleading statements:

• Osama bin Laden doesn’t even like Saddam Hussein!
• They didn’t find a single Weapon of Mass Distruction in Iraq!

Get ready for your head to hurt as I quickly unpack these items and shed a little light.

These first two questions supposes specific answers. They really aren't questions. It is a statement that we are half way around the world fighting people we don’t know. It also implies they were all loving little bunny rabbits all nestled down in the Garden of Eden and we came out of nowhere with our bombs and started murdering someone's defenseless grandmother. I am knowingly packing this paragraph with words that evoke emotions to make the point that the phrase is meant to evoke emotions in support of these unprovoked peace-lovers.

The question "why" won’t be answered for many people and I am not going to try to answer it here other than to say that the U.N. and NATO all placed sanctions on Sadam and Iraq and that was a large part of why we were there to begin with. Another good question I have heard was, “Why attack Iraq when we did? We were fighting bin Laden in Afghanistan. Why suddenly go for Iraq? Wasn't the Iraq War a knee-jerk cowboy thing?"

Here are three reasons why the top two heartfelt emotions should be examined:

• Sadam didn’t comply with those sanctions. He defied the U.N. and knowingly maintained his ability to create WMDs and worked hard to be ready to create and use WMDs:http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/report/2004/isg-final-report/
  
• After the U.N. left Iraq exhausted, President Bill Clinton launched an attack (along with the UK) for four days against Saddam and called for an Iraq regime change. After President George H.W. Bush dodged an attempted assassination on April 16th by Saddam, Bill Clinton launch an attack on Bagdad again. When George W. Bush became president, Clinton briefed Bush stating regret that Saddam and bin Laden were still at large. Clinton told Bush that Saddam will “cause you a world of problems.” (Chollet, Derek and James Goldgeier (2008). America Between the Wars. Public Affairs, Perseus Books Group. )
  
• Early in 2003, the U.S., U.K. and Spain proposed the 18 resolution to support the previous 17 by demanding a deadline for full compliance and room for U.N inspectors to have complete and unfettered access to all situations and account for the litteral tons of WMDs and their associated materials that were not found in the two previously blocked U.N. inspections. Reports showed that Iraq was being affected by the sanctions to the degree that Saddam seemed unable to build new weapons, but tons of the old weapons and materials were still missing. On January 20th the French Foreign Minister declared “we believe that military intervention would be the worst solution.” Later, it was determined by records found at Bagdad that the French were trading with Saddam in defiance of the U.N. resolutions.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_war

We keep hearing that the Iraq War was this knee-jerk decision to run into Iraq like a drunken cowboy foregoing diplomacy and declare war for the sake of war. What we do know are a few things:

• Saddam was successfully trading in defiance of U.N. sanctions including in items of a military nature.
• Saddam was talking about having WMDs post U.N. sanctions and inspections.
• Numerous independent reports confirm that while Saddam wasn’t building new WMDs (determined after the war) he was still not complying with the U.N. inspectors and accounting for the remaining yet-to-be-accounted-for WMDs.
• Saddam was recorded by those same sources as maintaining his ability to put WMDs back into production as soon as possible.
• We know that George H.W. Bush, President Bill Clinton and President George W. Bush all supported and acknowledged the need to unseat the Saddam regime.
• We know that Saddam attempted to murder President George H.W.Bush.
• We know that we had been dealing both militarily on three occasions (one under G.H.W. Bush and two situations under B. Clinton) as well as diplomatically with Iraq from 1991 until 2003 (12 years) on these issues.

To say that Iraq was sudden, or knee-jerk, or baseless, or simply all about WMDs would be a massive over-simplification.

So, again, rest assured that both claims in world news are true. One, we haven’t found any new stockpiles of WMDs in Iraq. While that is true, we have found old stockpiles of WMDs that are degraded and should never have been there post U.N. resolutions. Click here to read about the aged WMD stockpiles that were found and that shouldn’t have been there.

To this day, the new Iraq Government is searching for those not-accounted-for WMDs. Just because the CIA stopped searching doesn’t mean there is nothing to find. The torch was simply passed. While it may be true that we didn’t find new stockpiles, the old ones are still missing. Click here to read about the end of the U.S. Search and the continued search by the new Iraq government.

The fact that Osama and Saddam aren’t the best of friends is nearly irrelevant. Going into Iraq and going into Afghanistan were two different issues addressed by Congress. There is no question that Iraq has an Al Qaeda connection. Click here to read about the Al Qaeda Iraq connection.